Gene Cao's Blog

I attended Dell’s third annual global summit last week at the company’s headquarters in Austin, Texas to get an update on the company’s progress since it went private. The event demonstrated Michael Dell’s passion to transform a hardware company into an end-to-end solution provider. Dell highlighted five key investment priorities in 2014, including expanding its sales coverage and enhancing its relationship with partners; it also wants to increase its investments in emerging markets, with China atop the list.

The success of these investment plans hinges upon highly efficient execution across the organization. We’ve already seen one example that Dell has increased its executive capability since it went private: Its partnership with open source software provider Eucalyptus to put preinstalled and pretested Eucalyptus software on Dell VRTX servers. This project was ready just three weeks after CEOs of Dell and Eucalyptus decided to go forward with the partnership.

On one hand, the improved execution capability and more flexible service delivery model will strengthen the competitive position of Dell’s services. On the other hand, these changes will also provide benefits to end user organizations, including:

Now that WeChat has more than 100 million overseas subscribers, Tencent, China’s leading web content provider, faces a new challenge: improving the experience of its customers outside of China. Steep rises in content consumption — largely driven by the increasing use of mobile devices to access services and information — represent a significant opportunity for content companies like WeChat to go global. To achieve this, Tencent has made positive steps in boosting its investment in data centers and networking outside of China.

To improve its user experience in the rest of Asia, Tencent recently announced that it will colocate one data center in Hong Kong and has chosen Equinix to operate it. This is already the second node that Tencent has built outside of mainland China; the first was implemented in Canada to serve North American users.

As an Internet company that operates its own large data centers in mainland China, Tencent has deep experience in data center construction and management and has leveraged this experience to develop best practices and key criteria for data center provider selection. These include:

Networking and interconnection options. As Tencent intends to rapidly expand its business into more countries, it needs carrier-neutral data center providers to offer the necessary connectivity options. For its Hong Kong implementation, Tencent used Equinix to optimize transit routes to achieve lower latency and better connect users inside and outside of mainland China; the data center provider can access multiple networks and peer with members of the Equinix Internet Exchange.